Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Two railfans and a security officer who were at the Metrolink station in Chatsworth, California on the afternoon of Friday, September 12, when Metrolink Train 111 collided with an oncoming freight train, say the train had received a green signal just before the collision. The witness accounts were published in a recent Los Angeles Times article. The wreck killed 25 passengers and injured dozens more.

The accounts, if true, contradict the preliminary findings of officials investigating the crash, who have said that a red light was ignored. It was estimated that 350-400 passengers were aboard the Metrolink train when it crashed.

The signal in question is located about a mile from the Chatsworth train station but, according both to witnesses and to investigators, is clearly visible from the station platform. One of the civilian witnesses, a railfan, was expecting the oncoming freight train, but says that when he looked at the signal to see whether the train engineer had an indication to proceed or not, he saw that it was green. A few days later, both he and the other civilian witness told a Federal investigator what they had seen. According to an expert interviewed by the Los Angeles Times, false green railway signals are an extremely rare event, but they do occur.

It is not uncommon for eyewitness reports to disagree with each other or to be unreliable. However, in this case, the accounts of three witnesses agree with each other, and one of the witnesses is a professional security guard. It is not known whether there are other witnesses who disagree with the three.

Federal investigators have been focusing their investigation on cellphone records, which show that the engineer of the ill-fated Metrolink 111 commuter train had been sending and receiving text messages, including one only 22 seconds before the crash. They also conducted extensive tests of the signaling system. The signaling system functioned normally during the tests, and computer records show that the signal in question had been red immediately prior to the collision.

Federal regulations require railroads to notify the Federal Railroad Administration any time that a false signal to proceed is known to have occurred. A number of different conditions can cause false proceed signals, including communication circuit failures, wiring errors or, more rarely, software bugs. In one instance, such a design flaw on an Amtrak line went undetected for nearly 35 years.

Thursday, August 5, 2010

File:Google Wave.jpg

Google has decided to retire the Google Wave social-networking service after one year, citing lack of user adoption.

Urs Hölzle, Google senior vice president for operations, said in a blog post that “Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a stand-alone product.” Hölzle also said that as a “web app for real time communication and collaboration, it set a high bar for what was possible in a Web browser. We weren’t quite sure how users would respond to this radically different kind of communication.” Google says that it will continue the service until the end of the year.

In May 2009, Google launched Wave as a private beta. A year later, it became open to the public. Wave is an email service that integrates social media features and capabilities into emailing. It integrates IM-like features into its service. The company released components of Google Wave as open source for those to create a similar service. “The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users easily “liberate” their content from Wave,” Google said.

Monday, March 26, 2012

The Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis is about to challenge patent rejection in India before the Supreme Court of India. The court case is to begin on March 28.

Should the complaint be successful millions of people may no longer be able to purchase necessary medication.

The object of special attention is Imatinib, a medication used to treat certain cancers, which is marketed by Novartis as Gleevec (USA) or Glivec (Europe/Australia/Latin America).

The desired interpretation of patent law would give Novartis a renewal of another twenty years for its patent on the medication.

Over six years Novartis has been struggling over different interpretations of article 3(d) of Indian patent law, which rules the patenting of variants of already approved medicines. On March 28 Novartis will present another interpretation of article 3(d) restricting it to “discoveries”, while the patent application would constitute an “invention”.

Novartis’ head of corporate research in Basel, Paul Herrling, told the journal Nature: “[The case is] about the rewarding of innovation where markets exist, not about impeding access to medicines for poor patients. […] We think that Gleevec is a fundamental breakthrough in medicine. If 3(d) can be used to prevent the patenting of results of innovative biomedical research, it will certainly be a disincentive for both Indian research-based pharmaceutical companies and for foreign companies wanting to be active in India. This would be to the disadvantage of Indian patients.”

Brook Baker from the Northeastern University School of Law in Boston, Massachusetts, a professor in the Program on Human Rights and the Global Economy (PHRGE), explained the situation as follows: “Novartis would like the Supreme Court to adopt a low-threshold standard whereby slight improvements will count as significantly enhanced efficacy. […] If this low-hurdle standard is adopted, companies will be able to evergreen their patents in India much as they do in the United States. […] India is a major exporter of generic medicines to developing countries, including 80% of the medicine now used to treat over 6.6 million people living with HIV/AIDS. India’s status as the pharmacy of the poor and of the developing world is actually under attack.”

Médecins Sans Frontières has set up the protest web page “Novartis, Drop the Case!”, with information about the court case.

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Canadian Prime Minster Stephen Harper, US President George W. Bush and Mexican President Felipe Calderón met yesterday at the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America summit, held this year in New Orleans, Louisiana.

The first meeting was between Bush and Calderón. Afterwards, Bush noted that they “had a very long and very good discussion on a variety of issues. U.S. and Mexican relations are very important.”

Bush congratulated Calderón. “I want to congratulate you and thank you for your strong leadership,” he said.

“We talked about trade, and how trade has been beneficial to both of our countries,” continued Bush, describing the meeting before the speech. “When you and I grew up in our respective countries, the border region of Mexico and the United States was very poor. And today when you go down there, there’s prosperity on both sides of the border,” he said, claiming that the countries had been successful in combating poverty.

Mr. Calderón then took over. “Thank you very much, Mr. President. Thank you so much for your hospitality and for a very long and productive discussion we had today. As is fitting for the relationship that Mexico and the United States enjoy, we have been able to discuss a long list of issues today, because we have a very complex and rich relationship.”

Later in the day Bush met with Canada’s Prime Minister. “I don’t know if the people of Canada understand the leadership role you took in Romania, but it was strong and effective,” stated Bush in the joint press conference after the meeting.

Later in the press conference, Bush noted that he’s “always interested in making sure that, if there’s any bilateral tensions or bilateral issues, that I know of them, so that we can work collaboratively to deal with them.”

Bush also mentioned other points from the meeting: “We also talked about the importance of trade between Canada and the United States, and Canada and Mexico, and the United States and Mexico. And I assured the Prime Minister that I’m a strong advocate for free trade. I believe it’s in our nations’ interests that we continue to have a free trade agenda. All of us want to make sure we’re treated fairly, and we can do that. And this summit comes at an opportune time to reaffirm the benefits of the trading arrangements between our three nations.”

Calderón finished the press conference with, “we [the two leaders] have some important joint work going on, not just in this continent but around the world, including in Afghanistan. I appreciate your words about Bucharest, and I can tell you our armed forces look very much forward to working in partnership with your people in Kandahar.”

Friday, November 2, 2007

Researchers at Case Western University in Cleveland, Ohio have announced the creation of transgenic mice with substantially improved athletic endurance, which live and breed longer and are more aggressive than genetically unmodified siblings, and are leaner despite consuming 60% more food. The mice have been dubbed “mighty mice” or “supermice” by the popular press and have been compared to cyclist Lance Armstrong.

The changes were created by adding an extra copy of a single gene, PEPCK-C. This gene is already present in the mouse genome, but the modified gene is designed to be strongly active (transcribed) in skeletal muscle. (The natural copy of the gene, most active in the liver, continues to function normally). The gene mediates a crucial rate controlling step of gluconeogenesis and glyceroneogenesis, and its activity helps to allow energy production by the mitochondrial citric acid cycle. In the transgenics, more energy is available to muscle through the burning of fatty acids, with much less production of lactate (a chemical that leads to sore muscles when one exercises). This is not as major a change to the mouse genome as it might seem to the layperson. The PEPCK-C gene is already present in the mouse and a variety of natural mutations could likely cause similar results. The study appears today in the Journal of Biological Chemistry in a paper with lead author Parvin Hakimi from the laboratory of Richard W. Hanson.

The altered mice can run at 20 meters per minute (0.75 miles per hour or 1.2 kilometers per hour) for up to six kilometers (nearly four miles) without stopping. The average treadmill time for strenuous exercise on a 25-degree incline is 31.9 minutes, well in excess of the 19 minute average of unmodified mice. Females can breed at two and a half years of age, whereas most female mice cannot breed after the first year.

A colony of 500 mice has been bred, starting from six independent germline transformations (“founder” mice). The level of PEPCK-C in muscle is 9 units per gram of muscle as opposed to only 0.08 in normal mice. Levels of triglycerides and the number of mitochondria are also increased.

Hanson said that he did not expect that the results would be applicable to humans due to both practical and ethical considerations in addition to the fact that the genes might not function the same way in humans.

This is not the first time that the press has dubbed a genetically modified mouse a “mighty mouse”. Earlier scientists at John Hopkins University announced that they had made mice with massively increased muscle mass that were larger and stronger than their normal cousins. These alterations increased strength rather than endurance through the genetic modification of myostatin and follistatin, or by injection of a soluble form of ACVR2B to block myostatin activity in normal mice.

Saturday, April 3, 2010

Nearly two feet of the rail route in Kashmir, India was blown up by militants near the Pulwama district, affecting train services from north to south Kashmir. The blast came a few days after militants fought with the Indian army in the area, thereby killing fourteen people.

“There were no casualties, as no trains were running when the militants set off a powerful bomb on the railway track,” said Aijaz Ahmad, a local police official. He added that train services have been temporarily suspended.

According to police, the attackers detonated an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) near Galbug at about 10 PM local time (4:30 PM UTC), Thursday night. Two feet of the rail track on the Qazigund-Baramulla area was damaged. This track was developed two years ago, police sources stated. The attack came just before senior officers were supposed to inspect ongoing works in the Kashmiri railways.

The track was repaired on Friday morning and train services resumed in the region. Kamal Saine, Deputy Inspector General of Police, south Kashmir, told the Press Trust of India agency that the damage to the track was not significant and it took a short time to mend it.